Horn of Plenty?
Some say that legalizing the rhino horn market could stop the poaching that’s driving an endangered species toward extinction. But it could actually end up making things far worse.
By most estimates, we’re only 10 years away from witnessing the disappearance of one of the most remarkable animals ever to walk the earth: the black rhinoceros. A century ago, more than half a million of them could be found roaming southern Africa; today, poaching has brought the black rhino to the brink of extinction. The market for powdered rhino horn, which some Asian cultures believe to have medicinal properties, has grown into a robust sector of the $20 billion–per–year illegal wildlife trade. Currently, the market value for one kilogram of powdered rhino horn is about $60,000 — making it more expensive than cocaine, heroin, and gold combined. In fact, it’s become so expensive that some buyers consider it a luxury good: an item that’s a conspicuous sign of wealth more than anything else. In Vietnam, businessmen sprinkle shaved rhino horn into their cocktails; a set of genuine antique rhino-horn cups can sell for more than $1 million at auction.
Unsurprisingly, the fate of rhinos has drawn a great deal of international attention, most of which has focused on finding ways to curtail poaching through vigorous law enforcement, demand reduction, or some combination of both. But of all the different approaches being put forth, one in particular is worth noting, if for nothing else than its perverse audacity: breeding southern white rhinos — the black rhinos’ less critically endangered relatives — in highly protected ranch-like environments, where the animals’ horns would be removed, processed, and sold on a new and fully legal international market. It’s possible to harvest rhino horns without harming the animal; if it’s done carefully, the horns will even grow back to their previous size after several years. (Read journalist Austin Merrill’s in-depth exploration of the issue for onEarth magazine.)
The basic idea, ostensibly rooted in the logic of economics, goes something like this: In much of Asia, the extraordinary demand for rhino horn is deeply ingrained; no amount of public education will be enough to dissuade a cancer patient from believing in its curative potential, or to stop a wealthy businessman from wanting to display it as a marker of upward social mobility. As long as people are willing to pay top prices for it, an illegal market will exist. Poaching and trafficking will continue.
Currently, the market value for one kilogram of powdered rhino horn is about $60,000 — making it more expensive than cocaine, heroin, and gold combined.
Convinced that awareness campaigns aren’t enough, legalization’s proponents maintain that a supply-side solution is the answer. By establishing a legal market and flooding it with new product, they say, black-market prices will inevitably come down — along with traffickers’ profit margins. And once those margins have decreased to the point where the risks attendant to running an illicit operation are no longer outweighed by the economic benefits, the traffickers will simply quit the game. The legal market, at that point, will have effectively obviated the illegal one. Then we can set about restoring threatened rhino populations, while quietly feeding the international demand for rhino horn.
It does, indeed, sound like an elegant solution to what has increasingly come to feel like an intractable problem — especially when proponents throw in the idea that legal profits could be funneled back into conservation efforts. It also parallels arguments for legalizing other illicit markets that many people find intuitively appealing. But there’s reason to believe that, in this instance at least, the solution’s elegance may be masking something much less attractive: its superficiality. The simple truth is that rhinos aren’t widgets — those interchangeable units of production that economics professors so love to inject into their classroom hypotheticals involving supply, demand, production lines, and profits. They aren’t even crops. In fact, some new studies are showing that this market is far more complex — and thus much more unpredictable — than we currently imagine it to be. As a result, any attempt to tamp down on illegal poaching by propping up a legal, transparent market may actually run the risk of increasing poaching activity — and, perversely, hastening the black rhino’s demise — thanks to the untested assumptions that underlie and weaken the logic of legalization’s champions.
Assumption #1. We know how big the market for rhino horn is, and we can harvest enough of the stuff to meet the demand. Proponents like to claim that the illegal market for rhino horn would quickly collapse in the face of competition from its legal counterpart, as customers immediately flee the former for the safer, socially licensed latter. The main problem with this “customer hijacking” scenario is that it assumes the current market for rhino horn is fixed — which is to say, it assumes that there aren’t thousands, or even millions, of potential customers out there whose only reason for not purchasing the product up to this point has been that doing so is illegal and/or difficult. But there are. A pioneering economic study conducted by NRDC in conjunction with Oxford, Beijing Normal, and Duke universities, which will be released shortly, indicates that many people who don’t currently buy rhino horn would be much more likely to do so were it legal. In fact, the study suggests that size of the potential new consumer base could swell far beyond our capacity to farm white rhinos — putting even more pressure on the highly threatened populations of wild black rhinos that are already buckling from heavy poaching activity.
Assumption #2: Customers don’t care what kind of rhino horn they’re getting, so long as they can be assured it’s real. This line of thinking ignores the fact that wild-sourced versions of a product, particularly in the context of traditional medicine, are often seen as superior to the domesticated versions, and that the two items can exist side by side in the marketplace. Think of the perceived difference in quality — not to mention the actual difference in price — between wild salmon or wild shrimp and the farmed versions of these same animals. If the market for rhino horn is anything like the markets for bear bile or ginseng (and there’s every reason to believe that it is), then the appearance of a conventionally farmed version may simply end up driving prices even higher for the wild version, giving poachers and traffickers every reason to maintain, or even ramp up, their bloody business.
Assumption #3: Because the newly legal, newly transparent market for rhino horn will be so closely monitored and heavily regulated, it will be practically impossible for traffickers to launder their illicit goods. Except that in reality, it doesn’t really work out that way. Proponents of legalization — including the wealthy South African rhino farmers who stand to profit mightily from it, as well as a number of South African government officials — are well aware that the loosening of restrictions, in China especially, is absolutely essential to the success of their plan. But to see how a legal market for rhino horn could serve to encourage rather than discourage the laundering of poached rhino horn, we need only look at the example of ivory. In China, periodic sales by the government of confiscated stockpiles have created not only a flourishing domestic market but, simultaneous with it, a legal blanket for laundered items. China’s legal ivory trade hasn’t crushed its illegal one; if anything, the former has become an essential part of the latter’s business model, since it makes enforcement that much more difficult. The same phenomena can be observed in the United States, where the legal sale of older ivory has frequently been used to cover up the illegal sale of newer ivory. (Indeed, it’s believed that more than 80 percent of the ivory sold in California today may actually be illegal.) Given the difficulty of enforcing the laws in major rhino horn markets such as Vietnam, where illegally purchasing a vial of rhino-horn powder on the street can be done with relative ease, the last thing officials need is a major legal market being dumped on them.
SAVE WILD RHINOS! Urge South African President Jacob Zuma to scrap his plan to legalize the rhino horn trade.
As questionable as all these premises are, though, perhaps none is more questionable than the assertion that we have the time to experiment with high-risk solutions that might actually end up increasing the demand for rhino horn — and that might lead to more dead rhinos rather than fewer. A little less than one year from now, at the 17th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, it’s widely believed that the host country, South Africa, may throw its weight behind a legalization plan. Signatories to this international agreement should pause lengthily before agreeing to any such plan and reflect on the ramifications of getting this one wrong. Because doing so wouldn’t simply constitute an error. It could constitute a complete erasure.
Written with Jeff Turrentine
